Nick Jackson Of Twelve Bar

I just made a bit of a pilgrimage of sorts to Self Edge. Having never been to Japan, it was nice to just touch and feel a lot of stuff at once. I never felt so nerdy. It’s almost akin to spending days at a time in Deal Real Records or Fat Beats in the late 90s.

Nick: Exactly. Getting back to your question, it’s all about doing stuff that’s the right fit for the brand. We’ve had offers of doing a varsity jacket, and honestly nobody in this company has ever worn a varsity jacket. Perhaps, at some point it would make sense to do one, but we love parkas and M-65s. We love windbreakers. That’s what were going to do. It makes sense to us.

I like that your M-65 if corduroy. It’s really different from the majority, you’ve got an individual stamp to yours.

Nick: What’s funny is, I used to work at Maharishi. There are a few things people are surprised to hear I don’t like. One is, I’ve never been into comics. Which people find weird, I don’t know why. The other is that I’ve never been a record collector. I have huge amounts of music and I do have a fair few records, but its just something I could never afford. I used to be, its almost embarrassing to talk about, a ridiculous Nike collector. It is not something I publicize too much, but yeah I have a ridiculous collection. The other thing is, I’ve never been into camo. At Maharishi that was kind of funny. I’m not into the military, war and guns. I know camo came from nature and all that, I worked on the book, which was fascinating. But, I’ve never been into camo. I loved the M-65 jacket and the way it fit and hugged the body, and the way fashion designers adapted it from the military. Damien has never worn camo, and we didn’t want to do it. Our flavor is a pair of chippie chinos and some black Jordan's, and what coat will go that. It just kind of made sense. We’ve done two new ones for Holiday. One is mohair, which is beautiful and the other is a pinstripe, almost like the type of fabric you’d see on a Paul Smith suit.

Mohair really infuses a bit of the casual look that has alluded some of the current iteration of streetwear.

Nick: Exactly. It’s just about making things that make sense to us. I read an interesting article about Ralph Lauren recently in Vanity Fair. When he was building his business in the 70s, the whole studio 54 was huge, and Pierre Cardan and Ives St. Laurent were huge. Holstein. People were looking at him and thinking, you’re really boring. But, Ralph was like, I’m anti-fashion, I just want to make stuff I can wear everyday. To a dinner party or to a club. Obviously his thing was very WASPY, Yuppie, New England, Hamptons. For us I view it in a similar way. I want to make stuff that will look great now, that would have looked great 5 years ago and will look great in 20 years time. In a way that is almost the antithesis of fashion. It’s a constant challenge.